Every day on twitter I see posts where people are asking themselves the same question: MooTools or jQuery? This is because I have a saved search for “mootools.” Doing a search for “dojo” or “prototype” would find similar tweets from people considering those frameworks or jQuery. The fact is, jQuery is incredibly popular and it’s own popularity breeds adoption as much as the fact that it’s a good bit of software.

Focusing on the “MooTools or jQuery” question, it’s clear that there isn’t a great resource that helps people decide. Looking at the documentation and examples for the two libraries shows they share a lot of functionality. If you’re just now, in 2009, trying to decide which one of these frameworks you want to dive into first, chances are you’re probably relatively new to JavaScript itself and the prospect of comparing the frameworks by actually reading their source code is perhaps more effort than you want to spend. Were I in such a position, I’d want someone to do that for me; to look at them and tell me why some choose one over the other.

So, today I’m releasing jQuery vs MooTools which aims to do just that. No doubt this will cause a stir in our communities but hopefully it will be a healthy one.

I’m not trying to convince people who love jQuery that they’re wrong and should switch, nor am I trying to illustrate to the MooTools community what they’re missing from jQuery. This site is aimed at people who are trying to make this decision and is meant to be an honest comparison of the two libraries. It’s obvious where my bias lays – I’m a MooTools supporter. But I’ve tried to represent the two libraries fairly and, where my opinion is expressed, I try and call that out and say it’s just that – my opinion.

It’s entirely likely that I’ve misrepresented something about the jQuery core library in this post but I’ve done my best not to. Before publishing this site I consulted numerous other contributors to our community. I’ve shared the comparison with authors of other frameworks, bloggers who don’t endorse any particular framework over another, and even sent it to one of the jQuery team members. As I receive feedback, I’ll update the site to incorporate the perspectives of others that may be helpful for the target audience of the comparison (i.e. people considering the two frameworks).

I encourage you to leave comments on the site itself and not here on clientcide.

read on: jQuery vs MooTools

This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 2:43 pm and is filed under 3rd Party Libraries, Your Questions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.